I met Ben on the sidewalk. He was loping toward the little rose-covered arch that marked his front steps and waved to me, jogging to catch up.
"Hi," he panted. "Look what I got." He held up a large glass container that looked like a giant, old-fashioned lightbulb with a bit more neck. In his other hand he had a manila envelope.
"What is that?" I asked.
"It's an alembic. It's a distilling flask, effectively. Heatproof glass. One of the chemistry professors lives nearby and he gave it to me. It's got a chip in the top, so its not any good to him anymore—once they're chipped they tend to break or become unsterile. So I'm going to try an experiment with it and see if we can't make a genie-bottle for you.”
Enlightenment at last. "Ah. Mara told you.”
"Yeah," he replied, starting up the steps to the porch. I followed him. "She woke me up when she came to bed and I was thinking about it, so I called this guy and asked if he had anything like what you needed. Well, he didn't exactly, but he had this and he told me how to get a reflective coating on it—you want the reflective side pointing in, right?" he added, opening the front door.
I started to answer, but was interrupted by a squeal of laughter. While it was an improvement on some of the recent greetings from Brian, I still looked around the door with care before entering. There was no sign of the boy in the hall.
Ben took his prize into the kitchen.
Mara was lifting a waffle onto Brian's plate and waggling it on the fork so it flapped like a butterfly. Her son squealed again and raised his hands to snatch the waffle. Mara kept it just out of reach.
"Greedy. And what should you be sayin'?”
"Puh-leeeese?”
"That's better." She put the waffle on the plate with a scoop of chunky applesauce and a strip of bacon. Brian snarfed the bacon in three quick bites and washed it down with gulps of milk.
Mara noticed Ben and me in the doorway.
"Ah, is that it, then?”
Ben waved the alembic. "Yup." He held up the envelope. "John gave me some reflective coating film to put on the outside, too." He looked at me. "It won't be a beautiful job, but it should do the trick.”
"Are you sure?" I asked.
"Well, the theory's sound.”
Mara huffed. "Oh, sit yourselves down before you start going on and have some brekkie, or we'll be eatin' burned waffles with our soft-boiled theory.”
Ben sat at the end of the table farthest from Brian and set the alembic's neck upside down in his milk glass, so it looked like a giant glass dandelion puff.
"Sarnies?" Mara asked.
"What?" I asked.
"Sandwiches," Ben answered. "In this case, bacon in waffles so you can eat the whole thing with one hand. Yes, please," he added to his wife. Receiving his sarnie, he tinkered with the flask with one hand and talked between bites.
"See," he said, "this container should work if I can get this tint material on flat. The glass could be thicker, but this should do for a while. The material is more like ceramic, really, even though it's clear, so it's very dense. The Grey energy moves through it pretty slowly and the reflective surface should stop the ghost from getting out once it's in.”
"How does it get in in the first place?" I asked, managing bacon and waffle between sips of coffee.
"This is the good part. The reflective tint takes advantage of the reflective nature and density of the glass surface, so it's highly reflective in one direction and only a bit dark in the other. It's the same kind of thing they use on car windows. A form of Mylar, but very thin with some sticky stuff on the reflective side. Once it's in place, you can look in but whatever's in the flask will just see reflection and shadow. Um. . what was I saying?”
"How the genie gets in the bottle," I reminded him.
"Oh, yeah. Well, it has two options—it can enter through the material itself, though that would be very slow, or it can go in through the opening at the neck. You just sort of scoop it up. If you face the opening toward the poltergeist and get part of it to go in, the whole thing should be drawn into the container by the conductivity of the reflective surface. Once inside, it'll be momentarily confused by the reflection. Then you stopper the bottle with something nice and dense, like rubber—which I happen to have in the envelope, thanks to John Burke—and the ghost is stuck in the vessel, since it can't disperse through the reflective surface or through the density of the material itself. If you can corner it in some dense place—somewhere there is no history, no time fragments for it to slip away on—then it will have no option but to head for you and the ghost trap. The tricky thing is going to be getting it cornered in such a place.”
"Yeah, that's going to be the tricky part," I agreed with no small irony. First I'd have to stalk the wretched thing.
Mara snorted a laugh and went back to her own food. I watched Ben lay strips of reflective tint as thin as spider silk onto the glass and smooth them into place with a tongue depressor.
Brian crowed for more food and bounced in his seat.
"Oh. . blast," Ben swore, wrinkling a strip of the tint. He removed it with a single-edged razor blade and for a moment I wondered where it had come from, since I couldn't imagine anyone actually shaving with one.
I turned my attention to Mara and Brian—who wore more of his breakfast than he ate, since he insisted on raising his spoon as high as possible before pouring its load of waffles and applesauce toward his mouth. I counted us all lucky his arms weren't longer.
As we observed the spectacle, I asked, "Do kids have some kind of touch with the Grey that adults don't?”
They both paused before answering. Ben looked a bit curious, while Mara seemed mildly surprised.
"But of course they do," Mara said. She glanced at Ben.
He nodded, looking back to the flask. "Definitely. Children's perceptions of the world are different than those of adults. We know that they don't have certain types of brain structures, hormones, physical and mental developments, and so on before certain ages.”
"Babies don't develop depth perception until five months and more, and who knows what's going on while they learn to coordinate their eyes with their minds?" Mara added, trying to wipe her offspring down a bit. "Stop wigglin'! Are you a boy or a worm?”
"Worm!”
She raised her eyebrows. "Are ya now? Shall I put you out in the garden? Would you like a nice bit of dirt for lunch? We've some lovely fish guts for ya. Da and I shall have the fish.”
"Blech!" Brian shouted.
"All right, then, boy. Sit you still while I find your face under here…" Brian squinched his eyes and pursed his mouth while his mother wiped his face clean. She took advantage of the momentary lull to talk. "Yes, children seem to see the Grey things a bit more easily than most adults.”
"The theory," Ben said, "is that perception of the Grey is caused by the lack of a certain filter in the brain. The filter is something you develop partially by nature and partially by enculturation. Most people could see more if they weren't so thoroughly enculturated to ignore certain things. We learn to focus and to tune things out because our modern society offers too many stimuli for the human brain to sort efficiently otherwise. One of the first things we learn to stop seeing is the things others tell us we can't see. It takes a pretty stubborn mind— or one with a faulty filter—to persist in seeing things the rest of the world says aren't there. Now, my personal theory is that there's some other brain structure as yet unrecognized that determines the 'depth'— so to speak—of the Grey filter or if you have it at all. You see, that would explain why someone like me still can't see the Grey, even though I've been dismantling the culturally emplaced filters for years. Most people are literally Grey-blind, just as some are color-blind.”